Democracy is not static. It evolves. We are not living in the era of Oka, nor of Ipperwash, nor of Caledonia. Expectations today about how police deal with extra-legal protests, including occupations or blockades, are an evolution from and a reflection on those earlier incidents, as well as other times of public upheaval, including the G-20, Vancouver hockey riots and Quebec student protests.

So: With each successive injury to the shared expectation of peace, order and good government, comes a corresponding rise in public resentment of the identified perpetrators, a loss of faith in police, as well as growing boldness among the minority that sees in law-breaking a kind of force multiplier, which no amount of lawful demonstration can ever match. It’s as Ontario Grand Chief Gordon Peters has said: You don’t need many people, nowadays, to “do things.”

Here’s where that gets us: The federal government is engaged in apparently good-faith negotiations, led by the Prime Minister personally, concerning a new compact with aboriginal Canadians – even as chiefs such as Peters and Derek Nepinak of Manitoba, threaten to sabotage the national economy by crippling transportation and travel. Wednesday’s nationwide series of temporary obstructions and slowdowns, we are told, was just a taste of what’s in store.

Question: How does blackmail constitute a negotiation? And how, if one side has a gun to the other’s head, can the outcome be anything but a catastrophe? The founders of Idle No More have sought to distance themselves from the chiefs and the blockades. Sad to say, that won’t do them a lot of good. Just as the whole movement basked in the glow of public sympathy when Chief Theresa Spence was in the early, apparently more rational stages of her hunger strike, the whole movement will suffer now if protests veer further into lawlessness.

And here’s the thing: Why wouldn’t they, when the Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police himself, Chris Lewis, says they can? “First Nations have the ability to paralyze this country by shutting down travel and trade routes,” Lewis chirped recently. Well then: It’s now up to everyone else, we can only assume, to ensure this doesn’t occur. The OPP have given Peters and company a get-out-jail-free card – or a blank cheque.

Except that it’s not really a blank cheque, because of the cumulative social and political cost. For if police can’t be trusted to enforce the Criminal Code, the Highway Traffic Act and other laws where aboriginals are concerned, what’s to prevent any political group – say the Black Bloc, of G20 fame – from taking a leaf from the same book? And why should ordinary, law-abiding Canadians obey the law, as a matter of principle, if the highest authorities in the land don’t respect those principles and apply them in an impartial way?

In recent discussion of this issue, it seems to me, two aspects have drawn insufficient attention.

The first is that the blockades Wednesday, and other similar ones recently, are materially different from past eruptions such as those at Oka, Ipperwash and Caledonia. These new stoppages are not occupations; they do not take place on disputed land, contested burial grounds or the like. As Ontario Superior Court Judge David Brown has noted, they are simply protests, like any other. The Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor and Detroit is not contested property. Unless, that is, you assume all of North America is now the legitimate subject of an aboriginal land claim.

Second, there obviously must be some middle ground between Ipperwash-style lethal aggression, at one extreme, and Caledonia-style helpless passivity at the other. Are we to believe that it is impossible for the OPP or RCMP to move a small or medium-sized crowd off a highway or rail line without seriously injuring or killing anyone? If that’s true, how did police manage to “kettle” hundreds of protesters during the G-20 Toronto summit riots in 2010, with no loss of life?

Police have a tough job and get criticized from all sides. Their job requires the application of judgment and tact. That is understood. But the OPP in particular have, since Ipperwash, ventured beyond tact into abject spinelessness. Their “Framework for Police Preparedness For Aboriginal Critical Incidents” reads like a sophomore course in sensitivity training, spiced with Dalton McGuinty-esque mush. Nowhere, that I can see, does the document contain the words “enforce the law.”

Police may believe they are doing themselves, Idle No More and society at large a favour by sitting on their hands. Wrong, on all counts. If the blockades continue, the movement, such as it is, will be discredited. The Harper Conservatives will find themselves boxed in by an angry electorate. And hopes of achieving a new deal for aboriginal Canadians, already faint, will flicker and die.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile